Invasion Attack
A.J. Styles and Kota Ibushi delivered one of the year’s best matches on 4/5 in the main event of New Japan’s annual Invasion Attack PPV show at Tokyo Sumo Hall.
There were a few layers to the finish. Ibushi seemingly had the match won, and was on the top rope to deliver his Phoenix splash. Kenny Omega, the Bullet Club member who was Ibushi’s tag team partner for years (they were together as a regular team in the DDT promotion as well as in New Japan where they once held the IWGP jr. tag title), got up on the apron. Ibushi hesitated, then did the move, but was caught on his way down with a Styles clash in a spectacular ending for the pin. As several of the Bullet Club members celebrated the win, Omega seemed distant from the celebration. It seemed like the beginnings of a long drawn out tease regarding Omega having issues with Styles or the rest of the Bullet Club.
But after that was over, Kazuchika Okada, who had beaten Bad Luck Fale in the semi-final, laid out Styles with the rainmaker and Gedo issued a challenge to Styles for the title. Styles was laid out on his back, and Okada placed the belt on him.
The next night it was announced that Styles would defend the title against Okada in the main event of the 7/5 Dominion show at Osaka Jo Hall.
Invasion Attack was a major success as far as company momentum went. They sold out Sumo Hall, with 9,500 fans, at least 11 days in advance. With the exception of the G-1 Climax tournament finals, New Japan hadn’t sold out Sumo Hall, unless it was a joint promotion effort, between 2005 and the 10/13 King of Pro Wrestling show, which did 9,100 with Hiroshi Tanahashi beating Styles for the IWGP title.
But that show didn’t sell out until the end. This show sold out faster and had more fans, and there were a lot of younger single women fans at the show because of Ibushi’s popularity. DDT, his home promotion, has always drawn, by a percentage basis, a higher proportion of female fans then the major offices and Ibushi has been that company’s top drawing card for years.
Sumo Hall is unique, because the floor seats and the upper deck are regular seating like in any major arena. But the middle section are traditional sumo boxes. These aren’t chairs but they are risers where you essentially sit on the floor in a box. Each sumo box is allowed to have four spectators, but these days they actually sell two tickets per box, not four, as they did in the glory days, and even did two years ago for the G-1 finals, which is why there is a lower capacity.
That’s why they sold out with less than the old building real capacity, which was 11,066 tickets. The 11,500 announcements for G-1 final sellouts are the usual pro wrestling exaggerations.
There was a major negative as for the first time since its inception, New Japan World crashed during the show and they weren’t able to fix it for hours. There were people who were able to watch the show live, and I don’t know why that would be, but the vast majority were unable to access the show until several hours into it. We’re also told that those who were able to watch it were told not to refresh their page because they’d probably lose it. We’re told the problem was an outside hacker and the company wasn’t able to get it fixed quickly, although it was fixed by the end of the show and the complete show was there for replay viewing.
The show featured two title changes, both with new American teams beating The Bullet Club to win the tag titles. First, the debuting Roppongi Vice team of Rocky Romero & Trent Baretta beat The Young Bucks to win the IWGP jr. tag titles. This made sense to get the new team over. The second was that Michael Bennett & Matt Taven won the IWGP tag team titles from Karl Anderson & Doc Gallows in a very unlike New Japan match. The entire match story was that Anderson had the hots for Maria Kanellis, and couldn’t concentrate on the match. Doc Gallows kept trying to get Anderson back into the match. Finally, she started teasing him like she wanted him, which distracted him and he was pinned after a stuff piledriver.
The crowd didn’t seem into the story all that much. It was the weakest match on the show, but the way it was put together, it had to be because it wasn’t put together to be a typical Japanese wrestling match. The Japanese are so blatant when it comes to the women, both Kanellis and earlier in the show with the dancer girl who came out with Yujiro Takahashi.
For most of the match, the cameras were focused on Kanellis, and mostly her ass. Because New Japan, and Japanese pro wrestling in general in recent years, haven’t overdone the sexy woman deal like in the U.S., Kanellis, being an American, who looks like that, is still a novelty. Plus, Tanahashi really liked working with Bennett last year in the U.S., and New Japan has been high on Taven since the tag team tournament at the end of the year.
The show, which clocked in at just under four hours, was easy to watch with several excellent matches and no bad matches. Expectations were high for the main event, given Styles and Ibushi are two of the best in the world. If anything, they over achieved in what was one of the five best matches I’ve seen this year.
NJPW
New Japan President Takaaki Kidani said this week that New Japan World now has 22,000 subscribers and roughly 15 percent of them (3,300) come from outside Japan. They were at 20,000 after the Tokyo Dome show so there has been almost no growth since then. This idea just hasn’t caught on at all with the Japanese fan base.
They ran Korakuen Hall for the go-home show for Invasion Attack on 4/2, drawing an advanced sellout of 2,015 fans, as A.J. Styles continued his winning streak teaming with Yujiro Takahashi to beat Kota Ibushi & Tetsuya Naito in 15:12 when Styles pinned Naito after the Styles Clash. Styles won the main event of every match on this latest tour, whether in singles or tags, so they are trying to get him over as the best wrestler in the world.
One of the company’s leading PPV arenas, the Bodymaker Colosseum in Osaka, is getting a name change back to Osaka Furitsu Gym. It sounded so much bigger and newer with the Bodymaker Colosseum name, as the Furitsu Gym term dates back to the 50s. The original name went back on 4/1, when the sponsors, BB Sports BodyMaker, declined to renew their sponsorship deal with the arena.
OTHER JAPAN
Antonio Inoki made worldwide news, which even made Newsweek. Inoki, while serving in the senate, asked if the country was doing any studies into whether Japanese air space was being invaded by extraterrestrial life forms. I guess he must have watched some of those Ryuma Go vs. Space Aliens matches from the 90s. Well, hopefully they don’t vote him in for another term. Defense Minister Nakatani then explained that space aliens have never entered Japanese air space. He noted that they quickly investigate anything entering Japanese air space. They have found flying objects that aren’t aircrafts and birds, but they have never found a UFO that has come from species that resides anywhere but Earth. That’s good to know.
Kenta Kobashi, 48, a Hall of Famer who is very near the top of the list as the greatest wrestler in history. and his wife, are expecting their first child.
Onita issued a challenge on 4/1 to Chigusa Nagayo, 50, the teen idol pro wrestling superstar of the 80s and easily the most popular woman wrestler of all-time. Onita wanted an electric dynamite match while Nagayo held public festivities at her new gym in Chiba. Nagayo said she was shocked at the challenge and would give her answer in the future.
Makes all the more sense now
We have to see these mediocre a$$holes in New Japan then? 
